You don't need locals to participate if you control the central tabulating machines. They send in legit numbers and the numbers get skewed at the central point.

You don't need locals to participate when you have secretaries of state making partisan decisions like "I won't count any votes that come in after 5:00" or "Registrations have to be on one type of paper" or "We'll count these registrations but not those".

You don't need locals to participate when the states decide to implement touchscreen voting without paper backup and mandate it across all counties.

You don't need locals to participate in something evil when all they're doing is trying to avoid an expensive recount. You just give them the means and they do the work for you.

You don't need a lot of locals to disenfranchise thousands when you have someone mid level deciding how to allocate voting machines. The locals were yelling there weren't enough machines. They were calling the BOE when the machines failed to work and getting no answer.

We're not dummies. We vote locally and we understand how it works. But the old women who man the polling places around here have no idea what's up with voting machines. They can't control anything. If some dude in a jumpsuit with a name patch shows up, they give him the keys. Literally people could walk into these places with some "official" paperwork and wreak havoc.

And your statement still does not address what's to be done with sec's of state who subvert the spirit (and often letter) of the law to keep people from voting.

It doesn't have to be a widespread conspiracy. All it takes is a very true believers (like Noe's wife - the man is going to jail! and Wally O'Dell) and some people who demand "proof" or won't believe anything could possibly be happening.

At this point, every Democrat and left-leaning person has to decide if they are going to be more or less like the right. The right wing sees conspiracy in everything; this may seem like hyperbole untill you watch Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh. The liberals are stealing and destroying Christmas, the homosexuals are secretly recruiting in high schools, and the media is hiding the good news from Iraq. From the way they talk, you'd think they didn't have control of the executive branch, the House of Representative, and the Senate. The conspiracy mentality is the mentality of people who perceive themselves as powerless, and see themselves at the mercy of a host of invisible, implacable foes. It also comforts people who don't want to face unpleasant facts; the idea that the Republicans stole the election is much more palatable to democrats then the fact that Bush won. Of course, the worst thing about a conspiracy mentality is that it prevents a person from engaging reality in an effective way. All the effort spent on proving the "theft" of Ohio's electoral votes might have been better applied towards improving the democrats chances in the next election.

Let's try to be the "reality based" party.

You are allowing the argument to be framed around whether there was a conspiracy and whether Kerry actually won.

But we know the election was at the very least poorly run, laws were broken, people couldn't vote.

We have to look at what happened in 2000 and 2004 in order to make sure the next election runs more smoothly, and people aren't disenfranchised.

We need to know the votes will be counted properly next time. We need to know people won't be unfairly excluded next time.

There is no trade off between making elections fair, transparent and above board on the one hand and fielding good candidates with better campaigns on the other.

We need both.

As long as we erroneously concede this is about proving John Kerry won in Ohio rather than what it actually is - a call for election reform - we will continue to lose.

Something's amiss.

And bottom line is we need to have elections we can feel comfortable with. We need to be able to recount votes if need be. If exit polls were faulty (I disagree, but . . .) then let's make better polls, or find another way to verify elections.

Whether I think the election was "stolen" is irrelevant. No one can argue nothing went wrong.

To say it has to change the outcome to be a problem is just inane. It's like saying we can just negate all votes that didn't go for the winner, or if it looks like a guy's gonna win before the polls close, we can just lock up the polls and make everyone go home. Their votes don't matter.

Farhad Manjoo admits that the system is broken , and that partisan employement of election rules and procedures in Ohio did occur (Diebold voting machines made by Republican supporters that are easily manipulated and leave no paper trail), but he nevertheless concludes that the results in Ohio (and other states) were accurate enough to declare George Bush the winner. Not only is Robert Kennedy Jr. correct, he is obviously correct. That the last two presidential elections have been stolen is apparent to everyone other than Americans. Farhad Manjoo and Salon are in denial.

Thom Zajac

Santa Cruz

Uncle Albert made me chuckle. Indeed, imagine how horrible it would be if "N.Y., Boston, D.C., Chicago, L.A., S.F." -- i.e., the places where many Americans actually live -- were allowed to play a fair and equal role in electing U.S. presidents.

Albert obviously prefers the present system, in which a Republican vote in Wyoming carries four times the electoral weight of a Democratic vote in California; campaigns are confined to a handful of "contested" states; the candidate who got the most votes in the last open election did not "win"; and the U.S. government is determined by the prejudices of a rural minority scattered across a large number of small red states.

And yes, the electoral college IS relevant to the RFK Jr. debate, because among its many flaws is the sad fact that when a national election is decided within a single state -- Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004 -- the mechanics of stealing that election are much more feasible. Thus the electoral college, in addition to overturning the will of the people, constitutes an invitation to election theft.